does not correct our pride any more than the other punishments which
abound in life cure our other faults. Lydia's persecutors were themselves
the objects of outrages practised by their comrades born in England, on
account of certain peculiarities in their language and for the nasal
quality of their voices. The drama was limited, as we can imagine, to a
series of insignificant episodes and of which the superintendents only
surprised a demi-echo.

Children nurse passions as strong as ours, but so much interrupted by
playfulness that it is impossible to measure their exact strength.
Lydia's 'amour propre' was wounded in an incurable manner by that
revelation of her own peculiarity. Certain incidents of her American life
recurred to her, which she comprehended more clearly. She recalled the
portrait of her grandmother, the complexion, the hands, the hair of her
father, and she experienced that shame of her birth and of her family
much more common with children than our optimism imagines. Parents of
humble origin give their sons a liberal education, expose them to the
demoralization which it brings with it in their positions, and what
social hatreds date from the moment when the boy of twelve blushes in
secret at the condition of his relatives! With Lydia, so instinctively
jealous and untruthful, those first wounds induced falsehood and
jealousy. The slightest superiority even, noticed in one of her
companions, became to her a cause for suffering, and she undertook to
compensate by personal triumphs the difference of blood, which, once
discovered, wounds a vain nature. In order to assure herself those
triumphs she tried to win all the persons who approached her, mistresses
and comrades, and she began to practise that continued comedy of attitude
and of sentiment to which the fatal desire to please, so quickly
leads-that charming and dangerous tendency which borders much less on
goodness than falseness. At eighteen, submitted to a sort of continual
cabotinage, Lydia was, beneath the most attractive exterior, a being
profoundly, though unconsciously, wicked, capable of very little
affection--she loved no one truly but her brother--open to the invasion
of the passions of hatred which are the natural products of proud and
false minds. It was one of these passions, the most fatal of all, which
marriage was to develop within her--envy.

That hideous vice, one of those which govern the world, has been so
little studied by moralis